Durham optical design of EUCLID, the merged SPACE/DUNE ESA Dark Energy Mission

Robert Content

doi:10.1117/12.790442

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14 July 2008 Durham optical design of EUCLID, the merged SPACE/DUNE ESA Dark Energy Mission

Robert Content

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Proceedings Volume 7010, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2008: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter; 701025 (2008) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.790442
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2008, Marseille, France

Abstract

The SPACE and DUNE proposals for the ESA Cosmic Vision 2015-2025 have been pre-selected for a Dark Energy Mission. An assessment study was performed in the past few months resulting in a merged mission called EUCLID. The study led to a possible concept for the mission and the payload, paving the way for the industrial studies. I will describe a fully integrated optical design proposed for EUCLID as well as the different steps and difficulties to meet the optical specifications. ESA used the optical design of the telescope, the spectroscopic channel (ex-SPACE), and the space envelope of the visible imaging and NIR photometric channels (ex-DUNE) to derive a tentative mechanical design and related accommodation constraints for EUCLID. Starting with the preliminary design of the DUNE mission for the telescope and instrument, a series of modifications were made to make space for the spectroscopic channel and minimize the weight. The design of DUNE used a 3 mirror telescope of 1.2-m and a dichroic to obtain imaging in both visible and infrared. The design of SPACE, mostly a Durham design, was made of 4 channels each re-imaging a sub-field from the Cassegrain focus of a 2 mirror telescope onto a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) containing ~2.2 millions micromirrors. A prism spectrograph followed each array. This design was modified to reduce the number of optics and spectrographs, and add an imaging capability. The total field of EUCLID is almost 1 square degree nearly equally split between the spectroscopic and imaging channels.

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Robert Content "Durham optical design of EUCLID, the merged SPACE/DUNE ESA Dark Energy Mission", Proc. SPIE 7010, Space Telescopes and Instrumentation 2008: Optical, Infrared, and Millimeter, 701025 (14 July 2008); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.790442

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